New resource for ADEP information on Adobe Blogs

A new blog has been created by the guys at Adobe to collate all the best posts from around the web which focus on ADEP and other Adobe enterprise products.  Well worth a visit and there is already some great content up there:

The ADEP Post

The ADEP Post is a human-moderated aggregator of the best user assistance content created by the LiveCycle/Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform community. The community at large includes partners, users, customers, and Adobe professionals.

This blog aggregates content relevant to both the LiveCycle Enterprise Suite as well as the recently-released Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform

Overview of the ADEP Document Services modules

When LiveCycle became ADEP Document Services all of the existing modules were ported over but I thought it would be useful to revisit them all and see what as new.  This post gives a summary of the modules which are available to any Document Services solution (excluding the foundation services which come with all Document Services modules) and should be familiar to those who have worked with LiveCycle ES1/ES2 in the past.

LiveCycle Content Services in the ADEP world

A source of confusion I've come across when explaining the new world of ADEP to those familiar with the LiveCycle days is what has happened to Content Services.  Content Services was essentially the repository for storing files and anything else you needed persisting in your application.  It was built around the Open Source CMS by Alfresco and was used on almost all of the projects I worked on.  In the move to ADEP it's the one module the fate of which I wasn't 100% sure of.

Defining Document Services Custom Components (DSCs)

I've written a few custom components in my time working with ADEP but recently came across an excellent summary of what exactly these little (or in some cases large!) pieces of code actually are.  A recent blog post on the Adobe ADEP blog summarised it nicely:

A DSC is a component that can be installed on a Documents Server and introduces new functionality. It stands for Document Service Component. Most product components are DSCs but customers can write their own DSCs to create new integrations or functionality that require a higher level of sophistication than is appropriate with the use of standard integration options (e.g SOAP) or scripting/process maps. They are basically POJOs with nifty enterprise configurations around them that allow enterprise class life cycle, versioning and configuration (e.g. in an enterprise BPM system you don’t necessarily want a new version of a component to alter the way an inflight process is operating, or how a completed process reports audit data…) or even have to bounce the server to change the implementation of the DSC. It is definitely part of the secrete sauce of LiveCycle/ADEP Document Services.

Source: ADEP Blog

Acrobat Reader Extension limitations

I've been doing a piece of work for a customer who wanted a simple form distributed around their organisation for staff to fill in and return.  The only additional requirement was that end users need to be able to save the document whilst filling it in.  Most of my work to date has been using the Adobe LiveCycle product suite and so I naturally turned to Reader Extensions ES2 which would give end users the ability to save documents offline but comes at a rather large premium in terms of licence costs.

Blank screen when opening process in Workbench

Back to working with LiveCycle ES2 on a new project and had problems opening any process after installed Workbench ES2 on my laptop.  When opening a process in Workbench ES2 I was being shown a grey tab with no content.  The workaround seems to be to run Workbench as an Administrator (right click on icon > Run as Administrator).  Solved the problem but don't know why it needs it!

Connecting to LiveCycle ES2 Repository outside of Workbench

When trying to test some forms I was struggling to remember the location of the LiveCycle repository.  Turns out that you can access it via WebDav from Windows or directly from a browser using the following:

[code]

http://<server_name>:<port>/repository

[/code]

Login with your usual username and password and you'll be able to browse the repository hierarchy.

get-collection-size() vs size() in LiveCycle

Just a note to be careful when using the XPath expressions get-collection-size() and size() in LiveCycle to count the number of elements in a list variable. If your list is empty the two functions will not return the same value

Creating a test process to demonstrate this I added three variables:

• lstTestList


• intCountList -> count(/process_data/lstTestList)


• intCollectSizeList -> get-collection-size(/process_data/lstTestList)

Running this process on an empty list gives the following output:

• intCountList -> 1


• intCollectSizeList -> 0

So if trying to find out whether or not a list is empty use get-collection-size() and not count()

Turning off all process recordings in LiveCycle

A useful tip appeared on the LiveCycle product blog a few days ago which outlines the very simple process for turning off all process recordings; something we want to do before every release.

How to Globally Turn Off LiveCycle Process Recording